Tom Philpott on Food and "Class"

There's a ton of garbage written about the American food system. (No pun intended. Really.) Inaccurate. Misleading. Muddle-headed. Etc.

Indeed, there aren't many food writers to recommend, but one I do read regularly is Tom Philpott. I don't always agree with him --- indeed, most of the time I don't --- but he works hard to present facts and argument rather than blather and nonsense.

A fine example of his work is in his most recent post at Grist. Good reading from a smart guy. (Although the historian in me must note that he's off about about fifty years in his comment about an "official" policy of cheap/affordable food.) So, if you're interested, take a look. Better still, bookmark the Grist site. (Tom is also at twitter as @tomphilpott.)

In Praise of: Chris Raines and the New "Public Intellectual"

If you've read this blog for more than two minutes, you know that I'm all in favor of informed discussion and debate, which means I'm all in favor of what are usually dismissed as "scholars." You know: those pointy-head types who spend inordinate amounts of time studying a subject so that when they open their mouths to discuss their subject, what comes out is substance rather than fluff.

However, I adore scholars who then make the effort to share what they know with the rest of us. (The alternative being to remain closeted in their university offices, sharing knowledge only with other scholars.) People like that used to be called "public intellectuals," but I think of them as benefactors. Or saints, depending on my mood.

Anyway, that's why I'm a fan of Chris Raines. Chris is a professor in the Department of Dairy and Animal Science at Penn State. He's the model of a new kind of scholar: one who is not afraid of blogs, Twitter, and, gasp, making connections with ordinary people like me.

His blog, Meat Is Neat, epitomizes what scholars can (and, in my opinion, should) be doing with their expertise: sharing it in simple language that non-experts like me can understand. A prime example (no pun intended) is his recent entry on e-coli and grass-fed beef. If you have any interest in the current debate about food, food safety, and environmentalism, you should take a gander. (Hoof it over there? Paw through it?)

Chris is also a master of what Twitter can and should be. He's there as @iTweetMeat. Enjoy!

More Comments On Local Food

It always amazes me when anyone notices this blog. I mean, I obviously hope for that --- I am, after all, running a business --- but it's a big, bloggy world out there.

Anyway, some more local food folks showed up to comment (thanks!) on one of  my previous posts and that seems like a good enough reason to direct you to their sites:

One is from a site called Small Footprint Family (complete with advertisements for Chevrolet!) (That whacked my funny bone.) ( Been a long day.)

The other is from a site called Hyperlocavore.

Check 'em out.

Commenters Worth Noting

I have been meaning to do this for several days, but was just reminded that I needed to actually, ya know, do it.

 Several people have taken time from their own writing lately to stop by and post comments here. I'm grateful for that. (Because it's not all about me; really, it's not). 

Among the commenters on my post "Slaughtering Locally" were:

Melanie Rehanek, who blogs at Eating For Beginners and is the author of the terrific Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her. She's working on a new book title "Eating for Beginners," which is due out next year. (Full disclosure: Melanie and I have the same editor.)

Samuel Fromartz, who blogs at Chewswise and is the author of the also terrific Organic, Inc., the only substantive history of the 20th-century organic food movement. If you're interested in contemporary American food, it's a must-read. (Full disclosure: Organic, Inc. was published by the same press as Ambitious Brew.)

Alexi Koltowicz (aka Lex) is a contributor at Scholars & Rogues, one of my favorite sites.

And Zachary Adam Cohen stopped by to comment on another post (also on the issue of local slaughtering). He blogs at Farm to Table.

As always, I appreciate the contributions.

Another Take On "Local" Slaughtering. Another Impromptu Rant

Think of this as a follow-up to an earlier post about "local" slaughtering: An interesting and thoughtful essay over at Grist written by the typically thoughtful  Tom Laskaway.

The subtitle could be something like "You're Damned if You Do, and You're Damned if You Don't."

'Cause, really, there's just no pleasing the "pro-food," "sustainable," "eat local" folks. No way. No how.

Don't get me wrong.  I'm all for change. I've made that clear here over and over again, to the point of being a bore. (*1) 

But moving toward  a new future requires taking the present into account and understanding why things are as they are now. Any carpenter will tell you that you can't start remodeling until you know something about the underlying structure of what's already there.

The "local" folks don't get that it's impossible to return to a society that's "local" in its orientation. (Barring, of course, some kind of nuclear holocaust that leaves us singing "Wooden Ships.") (In which case, eating "locally" is gonna be the least of our problems.)

Put another way, we Americans live in an urban society with national markets and highly specialized agriculture (eg, Flordians grow citrus, and Kansans wheat) because specialization and national markets are the most the most efficient way to feed millions of people, the vast majority of whom live in cities (and therefore don't produce their own food). (*2)

That means, for better or worse, we must also live with federal regulations. The whole point of the USDA is to create a national food system that is fair and safe for everyone, not just for a few. The reason that the USDA spends so much time negotiating with large corporations is because those corporations "own" the infrastructure necessary to produce and transport the food.

Americans created that national food system a century ago.

The effort began more or less randomly, as entrepreneurs responded to astonishingly rapid urban growth by creating corporate structures for moving food from one region of the country to another (eg, oranges from Florida to New York).

Over the course of several decades, Americans  figured out how to moderate that system of private enterprise with a dollop of  federal oversight, the goal being to keep food prices in line and the food itself safe.

The system, which provided inexpensive, abundant, and yes, safe, food in every state, not just a few, took decades to create because it took Americans that long to understand that they were no longer living in a "local" world.

So there's a reason for the infrastructure.

Yank it out from under the dinner table --- take away the large corporations that process and move millions of pounds of foodstuffs; take away the USDA ---  and we'll be back where we were 120 years ago: With unsafe food and a screwy hodgepodge of food laws that differ from city to city and state to state.

Again, I'm all for change. I believe that, yes, we can.

But let's move forward, not  backward.

_____________

*1: Remember my historian's mantra: if we know that the past is different from the present, then it follows that the future is ours to shape.)

*2: Yes, I understand that the "profood" people are most bothered by the fact that our food system is national and agriculture is specialized. But so far, none of them have offered an alternative --- other than spending summers gardening and canning --- that would support an urban society. Now if their end goal is to dismantle the cities and have all of us move to the countryside, well. . . okay. But they need to say so.

Slaughtering Locally: Can It Work?

Nice article here  about the realities of trying to make "local" and "high-quality" meat. It's also a near-perfect illustration of the way in which short-term perspective skews the story. (Or, put another way, it illustrates the way in which long-term perspective can enrich the story.)

Here's the money quote:

 Despite the fees they charge the farmer (which can account for as much as half of the cost of the final product), small-scale meat processing is no wildly profitable business. And, because they can’t afford to pay a lot, it’s hard to attract staff for the difficult, unpleasant work.

The fees need to be put into context.

Yes, a small slaughterhouse charges high prices, and that in turn creates high prices at the wholesale/retail end, far higher than is charged by a "regular" slaughterhouse that operates on a large scale.

Why can't a smaller house compete with a larger facility? Because small slaughterhouses  don't have access to the one thing that pays the bills at large slaughterhouses: (literally) tons of leavings (bone, hides, blood, etc.)

Byproducts subsidize the cost of dressing the carcass and shipping the meat to large markets. If packing houses relied only on the profits from selling the meat (especially beef), they'd fail. And fast.

Put another way, if someone wants to run a small-scale "local" slaughterhouse, the owner is catering to a tiny audience of livestock producers who can and will pay the high fees for slaughtering. But they're also relying on a tiny audience of people who can afford to pay $25.00 a pound for steak that comes out of the small slaughtering house. (*1)

The other money quote:

The state’s landscape is ideally suited for smallscale, pasture-based livestock. 

Um, not so much. Sure the soil and terrain may be "ideal," but it doesn't follow that it's financially ideal. Indeed, New York livestock producers stopped using that "ideal" land for raising stock for food well over a century ago.

Why? Because they couldn't compete with midwestern and western producers who had access to cheaper land.

As important, however, they couldn't compete with other demands for that land --- especially from dairy producers who raised cattle for milk (for the great urban complex in the southern part of the state.) (Milk is more perishable than meat; economics dictate that it be produced fairly close to the retail market.)

I made the  mistake of mentioning a short version of all of this on Twitter, and was immediately told that the problem is "consolidation" that's destroyed the "diversity" of the marketplace.

Again, not so much. The American meat industry "consolidated" more than a century ago. The impetus was two-fold.

First, Americans demanded, and I mean demanded, inexpensive meat. But second, and as important, American urbanites, who made up the bulk of the population, demanded that  meat processing be stashed away in large facilities far away from the markets where that meat would be sold. They wanted their meat out of sight, out of mind.

So livestock production and meat processing moved to the center of the country. The only way to move the meat back to the urban centers was to ship it. And the only way to keep expenses low was by, you guessed it, using every single part of the animal: the byproducts paid the tab for keeping American tables piled with meat.

So --- more power to these people who want high-quality meats. But I wish they'd look past the allure of the "new"economy and the grooviness of the "local" for a larger perspective on the issues at hand.

___________

*1: By the way, I can't think any better way to reduce the amount of meat consumed in the U.S. than to switch to "local" slaughterhouses. Few people would be able to afford to eat meat. Voila! Meat consumption drops and, in theory, the climate improves. Two fer one.